Lance Armstrong, US Postal Service team leader at the 2004 Tour de France. / Peter Dejong, AP

by Christine Brennan, USA TODAY Sports

by Christine Brennan, USA TODAY Sports

After all those years of cheating and lying and making millions based on a fraud, Lance Armstrong looked Oprah Winfrey in the eye Thursday night and said, basically, "Never mind."

All the protestations, all the testimony, all the assertions of a lifetime that he had never cheated?

Never mind.

If you believed him for all those years? Never mind.

If you defended him? Never mind.

If you wore the Livestrong bracelet? Never mind.

Armstrong simply, easily, blithely went ahead and said the opposite of just about everything he has said his entire life prior to Thursday night.

If we didn't know it before, we know it now: Armstrong is one ruthless fellow. You almost wonder if he's human. He sued so many people that he admitted that he didn't remember who he had sued. One wonders if he has any clue what the difference is from right and wrong, even now. Was he just going through the motions, just because?

For more than a decade, he lied with ease. Yet, within one powerful minute Thursday night with Winfrey, he came clean â?? if that is in fact what it was, knowing who we are talking about, and whether he has any idea of the difference between lies and the truth â?? with the same kind of ease.

Oprah opened with five yes or no questions.

Did you use banned substances?

Armstrong didn't hesitate, didn't flinch, didn't even act like he cared what word would tumble out of his mouth next.

"Yes."

One word to overturn a lifetime of lies, and it tripped off Armstrong's tongue as if he had said the sky was blue.

The "yes's" kept coming. Yes to EPO. Yes to blood doping. Yes to other banned substances. Yes to taking banned substances to win his seven Tour de France titles.

And then he actually made a little joke about whether the next question was a yes or no question, or not.

At what arguably should have been the most intense, emotional, gut-wrenching moment in his life, Armstrong found time to be glib. Gallows humor, perhaps? Or, more likely, just one cold-blooded customer.

If it was possible to like Lance Armstrong even less, his 90-minute interview with Winfrey on Thursday night went a long way to accomplishing that fact. If he was hoping to win over some supporters in the court of public opinion while trying to return to some semblance of public life less than three months after being officially banned and stripped of his seven Tour de France titles, it's hard to imagine how he might have accomplished that.

He was even more unlikable than one might have imagined. He was smug. He was curt. He was cold and unfeeling. And he doesn't yet seem to get what he's in for if he ever wants to even consider having a chance to come back to compete someday in age-group triathlons and marathons.

One comment seemed to say it all: Asked about how he tried to ruin the image of his former masseuse, Emma O'Reilly, Armstrong said that she "got run over."

The way he said it, it was as if somebody else did it.

But he did it.

Clearly, the words, "I ran her over" were not in Armstrong's vocabulary. He comes to a mea culpa sit-down with Oprah, and he can't even say that right?

He also said he sued so many people, he didn't even remember suing her. It was a truly telling admission.

"It's a major flaw," he admitted matter-of-factly, "and it's a guy who expected to get whatever he wanted and control every outcome, and it's inexcusable."